All that’s missing in the warm and fuzzy “Safe Haven” — with Julianne Hough and Josh Duhamel — are puppies, rainbows and unicorns. Photo: AP

Julianne Hough and Josh Duhamel are oh so adorable in the sickeningly sweet Valentine’s Day date movie “Safe Haven.” (AP)

In a world that allows for the existence of Chris Brown, subway pushers and freakish superstorms, at least you can always escape into a Nicholas Sparks romance, where the men are strong and true, the neighbors are all kindly matchmakers and a downpour is just God’s gentle way of encouraging you to make out.

Adapting the author’s cornball formula for a second time around is once-ambitious director Lasse Hallström (“Dear John”), who delivers a cinematic valentine you’ll be reasonably content to watch on a flight in a year or so.

“Safe Haven” opens as a panicked young woman (Julianne Hough) hops a bus and randomly disembarks in the seaside hamlet of Southport, N.C., hoping for a clean slate that’ll erase her mysterious, possibly criminal past.

At the general store, she meets widowed owner Alex (Josh Duhamel), whose young daughter (Mimi Kirkland, the film’s best performance) helps her pick out cheerful yellow paint for the floor of her rented cottage. Which she’s able to afford even though everything she owns appears to fit into a plastic bag and she hasn’t yet started her part-time waitressing job at the local seafood shack but — wait, this is Sparks country! No hair-splitting allowed!

Hough’s character, Katie, has one gratifying moment of not playing by romantic-gesture movie rules: She balks at Alex’s leaving a gift bicycle outside her house in the dead of night. Which is a little stalkery even if you’re not a traumatized woman fleeing the law. “I didn’t ask for it and I don’t want it,” she tells him, annoyed. (Just imagine Lloyd Dobler’s radio serenade being dismissed this way, or Edward Cullen’s “I like watching you sleep” shtick.)

But, of course, Katie gradually loses her jumpiness and learns to accept Alex’s small-town generosity; she bonds with his daughter, though his son (Noah Lomax) is still busy grieving the loss of his mom to cancer.

Katie’s budding relationship is dissected and encouraged by her oddly omnipresent neighbor Jo (Cobie Smulders of “How I Met Your Mother”), who offers needlepoint-friendly gems like “Life is full of second chances,” and advises her to “take a lot of pictures. You’ll only regret the ones you didn’t take.” In an era where people regularly Instagram their entrees, this comes off a bit outdated, but who knows if Southport gets Wi-Fi?

Meanwhile, a detective (Aussie actor David Lyons) back in Katie’s hometown is in hot pursuit, doggedly combing through security videos and interviewing old neighbors to piece together her current whereabouts.

Eventually, flashbacks reveal the story: Katie, an abused wife, defended herself against her drunk and violent husband with a kitchen knife, then ran (right after another only-in-movies moment: the hasty bathroom haircut, where you chop off your locks with dull kitchen scissors and dye it with whatever’s on hand and it looks amazing).

But Katie’s alarming memories are a mere grain of sand tossed into the soothing warm bath of her life in Southport, full of beach trips and lazy afternoon canoe rides and long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last — well, not three days, per that timeless “Bull Durham” edict, but long enough. Hough and Duhamel, faces aglow with love and just the right amount of spray tan, are gorgeous and unchallenging. All’s right with the world.

Until, inevitably, it’s not; Katie and Alex must face their respective pasts, and hers comes racing nightmarishly in on, ever so subtly, the Fourth of July. Stands will be taken and mettle will be tested against the backdrop of detonating fireworks and flapping American flags. Secrets will be revealed (one’s a real howler). And Alex’s chivalrous vow will be affirmed: “You don’t have to be scared. I love you.”

It’s a sentiment that should go well with drugstore candy, red roses and Hallmark cards. In Sparks country, every day is Valentine’s Day, and every emotion can be summed up with one of those chalky candy hearts.